Talking candidly about his ‘dedicated and loving’ wife Rose’s suicide on an episode of Women’s Hour, Owen Paterson hinted at a possible link between her inner turmoil and his sometimes bruising role on the political front line.
‘Of course, there are pressures in my life. She hated, hated, and became much more sensitive actually to Press criticism,’ he told the BBC’s Emma Barnett in April, ten months after her death.
‘We knew she was anxious… she was certainly anxious.’
Tory MP Owen Paterson has been suspended by the Common Standards Committee for 30 days
The Tory MP expanded on this theme in more detail last month, via a heartfelt written statement to Parliament’s anti-sleaze committee.
The committee was considering whether he’d broken strict Commons rules by lobbying repeatedly for two Northern Irish companies that were, between them, paying him more than £100,000 per year.
One of the firms, Randox, had simultaneously been paying vast sums to sponsor the Grand National race at Aintree, where Rose, who he’d met at Cambridge and married 40 years earlier, happened to be chairman.
‘No one will know for sure why my wife hanged herself. But my family and I are in no doubt that the way this investigation has been conducted played a massive role in creating the extreme anxiety which led to her suicide,’ read Paterson’s letter to the Commons Standards Committee.
‘She thought it would carry on until it somehow found a punishment that forced me to resign as an MP.
‘She would have to step down as Aintree chairman and from other senior racing positions.’
Yesterday, these words started to look eerily prophetic after the Committee recommended suspending Paterson from office for 30 days.
Should MPs agree with the 173-page report’s findings, the 65-year-old former Northern Ireland and Defra minister can expect to face a recall petition giving his constituents in North Shropshire the right to force him out via a by-election.
This is how Parliament was able to expel rotters such as Fiona Onasanya, a Labour backbencher, who was sentenced to prison for perverting a course of justice to avoid a speeding fine, or Chris Davies, a Tory who was convicted of misusing his expenses back back in 2019.
It is debatable whether Paterson should be mentioned in the same breath.
Talking candidly about his ‘dedicated and loving’ wife Rose’s suicide on an episode of Women’s Hour, Owen Paterson hinted at a possible link between her inner turmoil and his sometimes bruising role on the political front line
Critics say this is an old-fashioned scandal. An MP on the payroll used his office, contacts list and even headed Commons paper to sell influence to his commercial paymasters. This will severely undermine faith in Parliamentary democracy.
Supporters, along with Paterson himself, argue that he’s committed only minor technical breaches of arcane rules, and is being stitched up ‘without due process’ by an investigation that ‘did not comply with natural justice’ – and that those who passed judgment on him did so without knowing about, or seeking to properly establish, the full facts.
A third point of view is that Paterson – who is affectionately nicknamed ‘wooden top’ in Westminster for being pleasant but not overburdened by intellect – blundered his way into a mess that has had tragic and utterly unforeseeable consequences thanks to a mixture of carelessness and naivety.
To decide which version of events is correct – and it’s possible they may all be partly true – one must wind the clock back to 2015 when the MP was twiddling his thumbs after being sacked as Defra secretary on account of his allegedly poor handling of summer floods and the contentious issue of badger culling.
Late that year, he was hired as a ‘consultant’ by Randox, a medical firm that makes diagnostic equipment and tests, on a salary of £50,000 per year, for eight hours of work per month – or around £500 an hour.
The news attracted some controversy, since he’d dealt with the company in his ministerial role just a few years earlier when, as Northern Ireland Secretary, he’d pushed for corporation tax to be devolved to Belfast.
In 2017, Paterson also started being paid a further £4,000 every other month for ‘consultancy services’ by Lynn’s Country Foods Ltd, an artisanal venison and processed meat company.
That also looked a bit odd, since the appointment came shortly after he spoke in support of a bid by the firm to sue the World Health Organisation for branding British sausages ‘dangerous’ to public health.
Randox MD Dr Peter Fitzgerald and Mr Paterson (left). The former Cabinet Minister was hired as a ‘consultant’ by the firm in 2015
‘I am a huge fan of the great British banger and I am fully behind Lynn’s call for a WHO public clarification,’ read a quote from Paterson that had been added to the firm’s press release.
‘I urge everyone go out and buy some quality British sausages.’
By then, Randox had decided to double the amount it was paying for his help, meaning that Mr Paterson’s remuneration from the two Ulster-based firms amounted to almost twice his Parliamentary salary.
The medical firm was also donating to his pro-Brexit think-tank UK2020, which in turn funded some of the MP’s trips abroad.
Cynics started to wonder what these companies might get for all that money.
Or Paterson might be tempted not to consider the interests of his constituents more important than those of his own.
Fast forward to 2019, when a possible answer appeared via the front page in the Guardian newspaper.
It was reported that Paterson had actively lobbied ministers and senior public officials on account of the two firms on multiple occasions, using several meetings and a series of emails to encourage them to take steps that would benefit both Randox and Lynn’s.
Paterson also used his Commons office repeatedly to conduct business for the companies. He also used House of Commons stationery twice to write to ministers for Randox.
Supporters, along with Paterson himself, argue that he’s committed only minor technical breaches of arcane rules, and is being stitched up ‘without due process’
All of which immediately caught the attention of Parliament’s authorities. While MPs have the right to accept outside jobs, they are generally not allowed to lobby Government for an employer.
The only exceptions to that rule come in circumstances where there is no financial benefit to the employer from the lobbying, or when the MP is seeking to right a ‘serious wrong’ or ‘substantial injustice’ as a sort of whistle-blower.
Kathryn Stone, Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, opened an investigation in October 2019 to determine exactly what had happened.
Covid came along and placed Randox and its political network under intense public scrutiny.
The Irish firm had originally been founded in 1982 by one Dr Peter Fitzgerald, in a chicken shed behind his family farm in County Antrim, when he was working as an academic at Queen’s University, Belfast.
It slowly but surely became a leading medical testing company, and by last year was involved one in eight of the world’s cholesterol tests, was employing 1,300 people and sold its wares to 145 countries, with offices in India, Brazil and the US.
Fitzgerald had meanwhile become UK’s 475th richest person with a £255million personal fortune, according to the Sunday Times rich list, and hobbies that included polo and horse racing.
The Pandemic would further turbo-charge Randox’s fortunes. Last May, it emerged that the firm had won a £133m contract to produce Covid testing kits.
Controversially, the contract was awarded ‘without prior publication of a call for competition, in light of the extreme urgency.
Questions perhaps inevitably began to be asked about the company’s links to the Conservatives, to whom it had donated around £160,000 since 2010.
Rose Paterson was brought into the proceedings at this point.
It was noted that her husband had persuaded the company to sign a lucrative five year sponsorship deal with Grand National back in 2016.
Importantly, Dido Harding, a friend of Patersons, was one of the people who might have been affected by the sponsorship deal. She was on the board at the Jockey Club which in turn owned Aintree.
Owen Paterson, who was riding with Fitzgerald, first suggested the arrangement. ‘He said, “Have you ever thought of sponsoring the Grand National?” We talked a bit more,’ the businessman later recalled.
‘It all happened very fast. I guess I felt it was high time we got out. The Grand National is the greatest horse race in the world and it is a privilege to be associated with it.’
Dido Harding, a friend and board member of the Jockey Club that in turn owned Aintree, may have been one of the most affected by the sponsorship deal.
She, of course, went on to run the Government’s Test and Trace programme, which was in turn responsible for buying hundreds of millions of pounds worth of testing services from Randox.
Although Harding is not accused of any wrongdoing, some people found the whole thing a bit too cozy.
Rose feels anxious because of the headlines.
Friends claim that the mother of three grown-ups became terrified by the possibility that the story would tarnish her reputation or affect her ability to continue working at Aintree or as a Jockey Club steward. On June 24, 2013, she took her own life.
‘We knew Rose was anxious about things, anxious about stuff in my political life,’ Paterson said in a later newspaper interview.
‘There were lots of things to be anxious about, but to take this extraordinarily, violent, final step… if only we had an inkling, we could’ve talked.’
At the time of Rose’s suicide, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards was asking a host of awkward questions about the work her husband had carried out for both Randox – which last November bagged another £374m Government contract – and Lynn’s.
He had approached the Food Standards Agency and its chair Heather Hancock in 2016 and 2017 about the suggestion that milk sold in supermarkets contained antibiotic residues.
Paterson stated that Randox had developed a test to detect such residues in meetings and via email. He urged FSA to adopt it.
He also wrote to Priti Patel, then International Development Secretary, asking her to meet with representatives from the medical company to discuss how they could use its technology in aid projects that involved blood tests.
In January 2017, he met with junior Dfid minister Rory Stewart to discuss ‘potential commercial opportunities Randox may wish to explore’.
He also sent a series of emails to the Food Standards Agency on behalf of Lynn’s Foods without declaring that he was a paid consultant, in an apparent breach of the rules.
And in one initiative he sought to have one of Lynn’s competitors forced to re-label their product so as not to compete with Lynn’s own ‘nitrite-free’ products.
During this time, his Parliamentary Office was used 25 times to meet with representatives from the firms.
In his defence, Paterson argued that his lobbying work was allowed under the rules because it was seeking to right what he believed was a ‘serious wrong’ or a ‘substantial injustice’ or to improve public policy.
However, the Commissioner for Standards concluded that he had overstepped the mark in most cases.
The Committee was unanimous in their agreement. It didn’t help that at no stage did he appear to have sought guidance from the Commons authorities to ensure that he stayed on the right side of the rules.
The fact that he initiated contact with government officials on most occasions was a further sign of his gravity.
Paterson claimed he was forced by Parliament to attend business meetings, which would have implied that those meetings were within the rules.
However the Commissioner found that on one occasion that he’d cited, the meetings had taken place at 9.30am and 3.15pm (when MPs were actually voting at 10pm), and on another they’d taken place at 9am when MPs didn’t have to vote until 12.15.
Paterson complained to Paterson that the Commissioner had not spoken with 17 witnesses, which would have confirmed Paterson’s version of events about various aspects of the alleged lobbying.
The Committee appears to have concluded their evidence would be irrelevant to its conclusions and his work was, instead, an egregious case of paid advocacy’ which has ‘brought the House into disrepute’.
In the days ahead, fellow MPs will have the opportunity to discuss his fate.